A blog about living in New Jersey, trying to write fiction, taking pictures, watching bad reality TV, and obsessing about other people's dogs.

Sunday, January 20, 2008

You've Lost That Loving Feeling

So, Top Gun was on last night (I imagine it plays virtually every day on some channel or another) and even though I was tired after having been to an art opening and a party in Germantown (I am quite popular), I had to stay up to watch the whole thing. I kept saying, Okay, I'll go to bed after Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis make out...Okay, I'll go to bed after Meg Ryan shows up...After Goose dies...I finally made it upstairs after the credits ran at 2 a.m. The best is the volleyball scene where Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer and that other dude who was in Roxanne are shirtless but then Goose has on a tee shirt and Bermuda shorts. That's got to have hurt his pride somewhat. Is this film an underground classic in the male gay culture? It should be, since every other scene has these dudes walking around in white towels for no real reason. And let's face it, Kelly McGillis isn't the most feminine of women. She could definitely be a guy in drag.

In grad school, my friend Danielle and I started writing a screenplay that "flipped the switch" on these type of Ur-masculine movies. It was the same story line essentially, except the gender roles were reversed. The first scene opens with this woman getting ready to leave for work. She's a rancher who has to track down all these wild horses or something. In the background, you see this naked hot guy in bed with the sheets draped around his waist, asking her when she'll be back. She's very cavalier about the whole thing and throws him a banana. The next scene takes place in a male strip club where she's meeting her friend for lunch and beers. While they're talking, you see these peripheral men in G-strings dancing around though they don't have any lines or interact with the central characters in any way. We soon learn that the woman has a chip on her shoulder because her dead mother supposedly failed in some way and so she's always trying to make up for that and prove how great she is but in the process, she puts her other fellow ranchers in harms way. I think we also wrote that she was visibly pregnant but that plot point was never addressed or mentioned in any way. Silly. I wish I could find the script though, because it was fun to write.

I'll try to write again later--I'm at ING right now because Ernesto spilled a glass of water on my laptop and it's not working. I'm hoping it just needs to dry out or something.